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In similar manner: "what about silicon photonics?" IIUC fiber transceivers have become better than baseband copper differential pair transceivers for same-rack
by namibj 3y ago
In similar manner: "what about silicon photonics?"
IIUC fiber transceivers have become better than baseband copper differential pair transceivers for same-rack cluster interconnects.
And the main issue with them is packaging difficulty/needing to have a cheap link to the switching fabric data plane, if these benefits are to remain strong after accounting for the overhead that result from not being able to integrate the PHY on the same die as the fabric data plane.
Both efficiency and cost.
- adapteva 3y agoYes, you are right that pseudo-integrated silicon-photonics is really exciting! The Ayar Labs + Intel FPGA chiplet combo based on AIB is a great example. Packaging is one of the really big challenges, DARPA invested ~$100M to solve this problem with the PIPES program.